Indigenous culture at heart of health plan

Healing physical and emotional wounds in a culturally sensitive way is the focus of a new 10-year national Aboriginal health plan.

The federal government released the blueprint on Tuesday after a long consultation process with indigenous communities and health experts.

Indigenous Health Minister Warren Snowdon says the plan will address racism in the health system and empower Aboriginal people to get healthy.

"This is the first time such a plan has been developed," Mr Snowdon told reporters in Brisbane.

"I think that in itself says there'll be a difference."

The plan includes strengthening the Aboriginal controlled health sector, community decision making, a focus on culture and social and emotional wellbeing and ways to remove racism from the health sector.

There will renewed focus on maternal health, children, youth, adults and aged care.

It will call for housing, education and employment prospects to be improved to help eliminate causes of health inequality.

The life expectancy gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians is 11.5 years for men and 9.7 years for women.

This year's report card to parliament said efforts to close the gap on life expectancy by 2031 were falling behind.

The national indigenous health plan says there has to be a strong focus on the chronic diseases affecting middle aged indigenous people in order to close the life expectancy gap.

Over the next decade projected funding for indigenous health programs is an estimated $12 billion, Mr Snowdon said.

Opposition indigenous health spokesman Andrew Laming said it was telling that state and territory health ministers had not endorsed the plan.

"The plan appears to be yet another exercise in political spin, lacking any substance, and fails to say how we are going to get there," he said.

Mr Laming said he suspected the $12 billion was not new money but ordinary annual expenses of the federal health department extrapolated over 10 years.

He raised concerns about the plan's lack of an early intervention strategy to improve the health of toddlers.